Birds and Dolphins.
A reworked section.
Apologies everyone, it’s been a while. Last year I decided to write a first draft of a book in substack posts. It worked to get me writing but, looking back at my first post, I feel quite ashamed. It was incredibly slow and rambling.
Since then, I have been trying to comb it all out and structure a narrative. Deciding on how to handle the chronology has been a big challenge. And now, at last, I’m back to reworking that first, rambling notebook-drain into a draft first chapter.
Here’s the first part of that draft.
09/12/06, Long Biên island, Hà Nội, Việt Nam.
The river’s slow and malty, too big for the city. The far bank is somewhere else: airport land. There's an island in the middle, streamed to a fish-shape, too silty to build on, but raked and patchworked with smallholdings because the soil is so good. Black-winged kites hover and float over the raked places.
The "Red River," but it's pink really, in fact and in name: Sông Hồng. Pink silt glints with Himalayan mica when it dries on the island's sides. Birds follow it down on migration. Some overwinter and they're why we're here: Saturday morning expat birding. JP raises his glasses and then his binoculars. "Looks like a rubythroat," he says.
JP is an English birder and that's a bird that would look at home in an English garden but its name has a drop of awe in its tail, even here. Only a handful of our autumns have been rarefied enough to precipitate one. Siberian rubythroat; for all the birds of paradise JP has seen, he will speak that name gently. A little thing on a bamboo cane over a tomato patch, whistling in winter. I raise my own glasses. *Luscinia*, I think, like the dove-backed bluethroats we've already flushed from the path. A thrush, or not exactly.
The type genus for thrushness is Turdus. Like Turdus merula for the blackbirds in the Cotoneaster in my childhood garden. From Chiloe to Vanuatu to the Cape there are birds which run in bursts in tight waistcoats, and then stop to consider. For me and for Linnaeus, they manifest as modulations of T. merula. Luscinia don't do that; the signal's less clear and the taxonomy's in flux. But it is still just a few spans along on the Tree of Life, and I think I can still see Thrush in the rubythroat's lines. His beak is fine and there's a dark swipe back through his eye. His back is unmottled watercolour brown and his throat bears a scarlet mark; a neat cherry-petal.
But he's only a thrush when he stops to sit up. Singing, he slouches like a bulbul on the crosswise cane, his voicebox slung low. Even though it's just a reedy winter run-through of his song, it warps him right out shape and, to my eyes, right out of his perch in the Tree. He stops to watch us from one eye and he's right to be wary. There are mist nets in these reedbeds, and not for research. He can't know I'm just a gawker. Green tomatoes grow taut beneath him. Singing over a vegetable patch. No big news in Hanoi.
There's a pressure in that bird that's pushed him past every net, cat and slingshot from here to the far side of China and is warming his throat to go home. The cherry-petal trembles and shakes off a flash of lilac. I never knew it was iridescent, that wasn't in the book! I've never seen a colour like that in a bird before. It's off the map of birds and the map of Mars couldn't hold it either. It doesn't exist.
The river grinds against the land, thick and silt and with white plastic bags held in it fossilising already. Mattocks fall. Struggling over the clods of manure is a little corpse-blotchy, purse-bellied toad Bufo melanostictus. Sky's uncle. In the story, he calls for the rain.
In bed, in our rented house, I read "Strange tales from a Chinese Studio." Bored young men of the scholar class collect uncanny nick-nacks and girlfriends. One has a crystal bowl from the underwater palace of the Dragon King, another cheats on a fox fairy with a ghost. Both of them get away with it, which is the strangest thing. The glossary says that the word *qi* in the title doesn't mean 'strange' exactly but 'remarkable,' 'outré', 'recherché.' It's sometimes translated as 'rare.' It is what one seeks out when one has become bored with the common run of men and things.
I worry that's me. I sit at my desk in Tonkin with my photocopied maps and reports and I dream about white-fronted geese, falling into the green and gold grass of home, turning their shoe-shaped heads towards... something. I'm not sure what something that bends the world, like Siberia. In London I dreamed at night about a feather long as a crane's, flexed like metal and coloured like flame; and a mist-net with a hole burned right through. In the grey winter sky of this city, sticky as clay, no cranes and no gulls are passing. Red-whiskered bulbuls sings in the ylang ylang trees, common as muck and everything real can be trapped.
I am a conservation biologist; rarity is a diagnostic parameter.
Sam has an algorithm, though. It crawls up the Tree and returns scores of evolutionary distinctiveness. The stuffed platypus in Sam's cluttered office in the Royal Zoological Society represents the most evolutionarily distinct species of mammal. "Primitive" is what my childhood books taught me to call this animal, that can see electricity and fights with a venomous spur. "Primitive" is a meaningless word. Platypus and pangolins, solenodons and the long-eared jerboa are evolutionarily distinct; the algorithm returns them. Sam delights in something in our sense of the wonderful having measurable weight. We're not used to good news like that. No algorithm would return the rubythroat, but rubythroats are Least Concern.
Under his EDGE project at ZSL, Sam's out now on the Yangtze, looking for its pale, long-beaked river dolphin, the baiji. EDGE stands for Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered and the baiji is EDGE species number one. I dropped into Sam's office when I was on my way down the library for all I could find on my own five-letter Asian mammal, one the algorithm hasn't even scored yet. That was more than a year and a half ago and on Monday I finally leave for the field.
Hannah gets into bed and the train moans in the distance. In two nights I will be on it. The dark night's blustery, and I realize don't actually want to be out in it. I dream about lions and by vampires. The river keeps moving, all muscle, all night.
12/12/06 Hà Nội
Monday morning I wake from a better dream: birds and dolphins. I still have a lot to prepare and pack before I can climb into my lamplit berth on the train and go rattling down the gullet of Vietnam. I let my laptop load itself up with email and take it, unopened, down for coffee by the lake.
The lake stinks. The water's low and sharp papyrus sedge is already growing on a new little black beach. A tan and white bitch trots along it, under the concrete bank, sniffing at turds, are all of which are canine. "So dirty!" a man calls, in English, but he's talking about my shoes. They're still caked with river mud so I accept the white plastic slippers and give them to him for a shine. He won't accept 20 thousand and gives me back change.
The pea-green surface is pitted with kissing mouths because there are fish here that can handle the eutrophic anoxia if they gulp enough air. There are still the toxins, though, silver corpses in the shallows. Across the water there are aquarium shops on a side-alley. They sell South American dragonfish, another 'primitive' and ox headed cichlids, domestic, their faces swollen with blisters for the collectors. Qi, the kind of stuff we're up against. The Asian dragonfish are more valuable, of course, like the Asian rhinos, and getting fished out of their Bornean streams. I open the laptop while my coffee drips.
Hi guys,
I've changed my flight and will be getting back to the UK on the afternoon of Friday December 15th - I guess around 3:20 pm. We've effectively finished the survey now and have found no baiji whatsoever in the entirety of the Yangtze. The species is almost certainly extinct - we must have missed it by only a few months. It's one of the saddest things that I can imagine, the world is that little bit greyer, and what's more, most people won't give a damn.
Anyway, see you all soon.
Cheers,
Sam
In my train compartment, two aspirant nuns sit taking very softly on the bottom bunk. It's taken me two meditation tracks just to realise how stressed I was. I should continue but I get up to talk to the tourists in another chamber. They admire the view of the ricefields.
A couple of shrikes, a couple of pond herons and a stonechat all the time we are talking. Not even an egret. Casuarina in higgledy-piggledy lines and no other trees. This land raises rice and we eat it and all else must die, leaving mirror after empty mirror for the December sun.
And then, in the distance and evening, the mountains of the old masters, the calcaire of the colonials, the karsts of Ninh Bình! They rise behind the rice like stories, like the air columns of divers, like standing stones far huger than men could have raised.
The first hollowed-out one soon after, JCBs in its cavity visibly crawl. And then the sawn-off stumps of more mountains, digested already. There's a cement factory nestling somewhere. There's no reasonable hope, and I'm still heading south.
A thin puddle on a bridge girder shivers and refracts as we thunder across.
Happy new(ish) year of the dragon everyone. Let’s hope we can all avoid getting eaten! That’s all for the minute. Let me know if you liked it.
It's now 'all muscle'. Great.
Reads quite well and better than it did before. There are a few typos I could correct on an editable version.